Another week, another breathless unveiling – followed by more crystallizing perceptions about the College Football Playoff race, never mind that the season is only now headed into its fourth quarter.

That’s the takeaway from Tuesday night’s updated CFP Top 25. It’s Alabama (we knew), followed by Clemson (yes), then Notre Dame (OK) and Michigan (makes sense). Georgia, Oklahoma and then – wait, what? – somehow LSU, with Washington State, West Virginia and Ohio State rounding out the top 10.

So there you have ‘em, the latest rankings put out by the selection committee that, not quite a month from now, will get together for the only set that matters. Or at least, that’s the theory.

“As we do every week, we start with a clean sheet of paper,” he said Tuesday night, “reviewing every team’s play from the first game to the most recent.”

The idea is to rank teams as though they had not ranked them the week before. There’s no reason to disbelieve him. It’s certainly the goal; the committee does its best to do exactly that. But is it reality?

(Does anyone believe LSU would rank No. 7, with a 29-point shutout loss at home to No. 1 Alabama and a loss to a mediocre Florida team that just got drilled by Missouri, if LSU had not been ranked No. 3 last week? Aside: Even knowing last week’s ranking, can anyone figure out why the Tigers are ranked No. 7?)

Human nature makes it very hard to forget where teams were slotted the week before, no? And if not the committee members, it’s certainly difficult for the rest of college football, which treats these rankings each week as though they matter.

Perhaps as important is the perception that’s formed after each week’s fresh Top 25 – and almost as important, after whatever the committee chairman said about how that ranking was derived. And all of this is despite the fact that teams routinely grow through the season – though sometimes it’s not easily evident from week to week, but only in stepping back to look at the bigger picture. Weekly rankings are not conducive to those kinds of evaluations, regardless of intent.

Mullens, whose day job is as Oregon’s athletic director, is the latest to step into the role as the committee’s chairman, which is high profile and thankless at the same time. And to be clear: Especially after the in-season rankings, the reasons Mullens gives and the opinions he expresses might or might not be the actual reasons a team was ranked high or low, or the actual consensus opinion of the committee.

The problem: Like Jeff Long and Kirby Hocutt before him, what Mullens says each week becomes part of the crystallizing perception of the playoff race.

Team A is a complete team? We’re concerned about Team B’s defense? It’s one thing when the talking heads do it – everybody’s got an opinion – but another when the committee chairman does.

Mullens’ words carry weight, and often set the narrative for the next week in the college football universe – on TV and radio talk-fests, in opinion columns, on game broadcasts and so much more – and then a week later, we get another incremental update.

In that atmosphere, perceptions about teams take shape and harden, even while there are multiple games left to play – this week, 25 percent of the season still remains.

It’s not a feature of the playoff system; it’s a bug. So here’s a modest set of proposals that would be better:

1. Don’t do weekly rankings. Leave it to everyone else. Trust us, the conversation won’t falter. And we won’t have official weight attached to stubborn perceptions of ever-evolving teams.

Just wait until the end of the season, when a team’s body of work is actually full, when conference championships have been won, when we’ve seen it all, and pick the teams then.

One valid concern about doing it that way was that the committee might emerge with a jarring result, a playoff bracket that did not resemble what everyone expected. Thus, the idea went, it wasn’t a bad thing to provide at least a glimpse of the committee’s thinking earlier in the season.

But a public conditioned to polls has instead been startled when teams rise or drop in the final rankings. And there’s no way to calculate how the weekly rankings have hardened opinions, both internally on the committee and externally – which forms the atmosphere college football fans (and committee members) swim in all week – to the detriment of teams that grow through the season.

2. Rather than weekly, do a mid-season ranking – a peek at where teams stand in the committee’s collective eyes – and then the final rankings. Or do a midseason ranking, then another three weeks later, and then the final set. It would allow for more than incremental progress, which often doesn’t capture teams’ gradual evolution (or devolution).

Those proposals aren’t new, of course; they’ve been discussed at various times by the playoff’s management committee, and change is not coming. The weekly reveal is a made-for-TV event, part of the package ESPN paid so much for (and this is not a shot at ESPN; FOX would’ve jumped at the idea, too). But it’s become part of the process. It’s not going away.

But one last thought: If you’re dead set on weekly committee updates, for goodness’ sake don’t make Mullens talk about it. Like his predecessors, he does a nice job of trying hard not to say much of anything. But what he does say inevitably takes on far too much weight.

And when the playoff inevitably expands to six teams or eight, it would be nice if the commissioners also revisited the idea of these supposedly meaningless rankings. They’re at best unnecessary and at worst problematic, setting perception – if not in stone, at least in a hardening sludge – despite games left to be played.